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Medical breakthroughs to watch for in 2019

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Dr. Tara Narula walks CBS viewers through the medical advances poised to reshape patient care in 2019.

CBS News medical contributor and cardiologist Dr. Tara Narula joined “CBS This Morning” on January 1, 2019, to preview the year ahead in medicine after a 2018 that rattled parents and bioethicists alike. Her segment split neatly into two halves: a reckoning with the past year’s scares and a forecast of where technology, diagnostics and therapeutics are colliding next.

• 2018 saw a surge of acute flaccid myelitis, a mysterious polio-like illness that struck dozens of children across the United States.
• A Chinese scientist’s use of CRISPR gene editing on human embryos in 2018 triggered an international ethical controversy that Dr. Narula flagged as unfinished business heading into 2019.
• For 2019, Dr. Narula pointed to immunotherapy, wearable health devices and 3D-printed tissue and organs as the three areas most likely to change patient care.

The Warning Signs From 2018

Before looking forward, Dr. Narula grounded the segment in what actually happened the year before. Acute flaccid myelitis left doctors scrambling for answers as dozens of children across the U.S. developed sudden limb weakness resembling polio, with no clear single cause identified. Layered on top of that was the uproar over a Chinese scientist who had used CRISPR to edit the genes of human embryos, a move that drew swift condemnation from the global scientific community over its ethical implications and set off a debate that carried directly into 2019’s medical news cycle.

Immunotherapy’s Expanding Reach

Dr. Narula named immunotherapy as the biggest story to watch, describing how it trains a patient’s own immune system to identify and destroy cancer cells rather than relying on chemotherapy or surgery alone, which can damage healthy tissue in the process. The approach had already been reshaping oncology through 2018, and Dr. Narula’s outlook framed 2019 as a year of further expansion rather than a debut.

Training a patient’s own immune system to hunt down cancer cells — instead of leaning on chemotherapy alone — is the shift oncology is banking on for 2019.

Wearables and Real-Time Monitoring

The second thread Dr. Narula pulled on was patient monitoring outside the hospital. Wearable health devices capable of tracking vital metrics in real time were singled out as a growing force in preventive care, giving patients and doctors a continuous stream of data rather than a snapshot from an occasional office visit. The same instinct that drives someone to strap on a fitness tracker for a workout is now being aimed at catching medical problems earlier.

3D Printing’s Next Frontier

Dr. Narula also flagged 3D printing as a technology moving well beyond prosthetics and surgical models. She pointed to experimental work in 3D-printing human tissue and organs as one of the more ambitious frontiers in medicine for 2019, tying it back to the same convergence of technology and therapeutics that ran through the entire segment.

Taken together, the picture Dr. Narula painted for “CBS This Morning” viewers on New Year’s Day was of a healthcare system trying to get ahead of problems — whether that’s an unexplained illness in children, an ethics scandal in a lab overseas, or a tumor that hasn’t been caught yet. The throughline was technology doing more of the watching and more of the fighting, with immunotherapy, wearables and 3D-printed tissue named as the three fronts to track as 2019 unfolds.